V. I. Lenin

Outline of Fifth “Letter From Afar”{1}

Written:Written between March 7 and 12 (20 and 25), 1917Published:First published in 1959 inLenin Miscellany XXXVI.

      Printed from the original.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1977,

      Moscow,Volume 41,

      pages394.2-395.Translated:Yuri SdobnikovTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
      © 2004

      Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the
      terms of theGNU Free Documentation License.

Theold programmewill not dofor the elections to the Constituent
Assembly. It should be altered:

Thisis an outline of “letter No. 5”. Please returnat once.

Doyou happen to have any outlines or notes for changing
the practical section of the minimum programme? ((Do you remember us
discussing thism a n y  t i m e s?))This work should be startedright away.

{1}This deals with the question of reworking the Party Programme. Lenin
first intended to devote the fourth and then the fifth letter to this
subject. But both the fourth and the unfinished fifth letter deal with
other subjects. The manuscript of the plan included in this volume shows
that Lenin subsequently added new points to it (2 bis, 5 bis and points
marked with a +).

Theplan became the basis for his work on the Party Programme upon his
arrival in Russia

(see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 459–63, 466–79).

V. A.Karpinsky said the note in the margin was addressed to him.

p. 394

{2}See Engels, “Zur Kritik des socialdemokratischen Programmentwurfes
1891” (Criticism of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891)
(Marx/Engels,Werke, Bd. 22, S. 240–43, Dietz Verlag, Berlin,
1962).

p. 395

{3}The book burnt by the tsarist censorship was Lenin’sThe Agrarian
Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution of
1905–1907, which he wrote at the end of 1907

(see present edition, Vol. 13, pp. 217–431).

In 1908 the book was printed in St. Petersburg, but was confiscated by the
police at the printers’ and destroyed. By 1917, only one copy remained. It
was first published in 1917.

p. 395